Do Your Landing Pages Give Visitors Choice Paralysis?

One of the biggest myths is that customers want a lot of choices. Businesses think by giving their customers a lot of different things to choose from, they’re bound to find something they like. It’s the old “throw a bunch of $*@! against the wall and see what sticks” theory.

The only problem is it doesn’t work.

Why doesn’t it work? The concept is called Choice Paralysis. The idea is that when you give customers too many choices, they end up choosing nothing at all. The choices overwhelm and confuse them, and it quickly becomes easier for them to choose nothing than to pick the right thing from all the options in front of them.

Applying Choice Paralysis to Landing Page Design

I’m always hunting for new ways to get more conversions. One of the ways I believe you can stop losing sales is to limit the number of options on your landing pages. Whenever someone comes to your landing page, you should have a clear action you want them to take. If you’re throwing several different options in their face, your call to action gets diluted because visitors don’t know what they should do.

Of course, this begs the question: How many options should you give landing page visitors? Do you want to corner them into choosing one thing?

Personally, I prefer landing pages that have no more than 2 options. This allows the visitor to more easily see the differences between the options, allowing him to make a decision without the stress of comparing several options.

One way to keep Choice Paralysis from setting in is to use a clear chart showing the benefits/features of each option. For example:

Package 1

Package 2

Comes with ABC feature

yes

yes

Comes with XYZ feature

yes

no

Comes with 123 feature

yes

no

Price

$299

$99

This gives visitors a visual tool for clearly recognizing the differences between the two options, allowing them to make a quick, well-informed decision. Just make sure you don’t get out of control with these tables and have them compare dozens of features, as that too gets overwhelming.

What do you think? How many options do you typically offer on your landing pages?